April 22, 2008

Everyone will know that you can search Google for a word, and I should hope that everyone will know that you can search Google for multiple words. Fewer people will know that you can tell Google to omit certain words. When we compare these three methods, it shows that Google either doesn't work properly, or doesn't work as we think it does.

Allow me to demonstrate:

At the time of writing, there are about 9,630,000 results for "scientology", and there are about 746,000 results for "scientology -cult" ("Scientology" without the word "cult"). Now, logically, we would therefore assume that "scientology cult" would return the remaining 8,884,000 pages, but instead it gives only about 1,100,000.

What I can't figure out, is what happened to the 7,784,000 pages that neither contain nor do not contain the word "cult"...

January 16, 2008

I've just found this video on YouTube. It makes for amusing watching, but probably not for the reasons its creators intended...

Scientology puzzles me. Setting aside for a moment the fact that it's nonsense - I mean, "setting aside for a moment any discussions on whether it's true or false" - I've always got the impression that Scientology's back story has a certain sci-fi feel to it. Now with that in mind, the fact the it was devised by a Science Fiction author is surely enough to make anyone suspicious of its validity... isn't it? And yet it actually has a decent sized following.

Maybe I can use this to my advantage...

People! I have seen the light! Much like the Pilgrims left England and settled in North America, so to did our ancestors many many millennia ago leave their home planet of Mars and settle here on Earth to start anew. And one day the descendants of those that stayed behind are going to come and reunite us and everyone will be happy and life will be wonderful*! But only if you give me lots of money*!

September 21, 2007

(Disclaimer: I am using the Abrahamic Religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - a wonderfully useful term I came across on Wikipedia) as the primary analogues because the UK is officially Christian. It isn't a commentary on other religions, except one which you'll see at the end...)

Firefox is a lot like one of the Abrahamic Religions. Opera, which is just as good but with some extras and some omissions compared to Firefox, is like one of the other two (it doesn't really matter which you assign; I'm classing all three as being at the same level as each other).

Safari is like an Eastern religion; theoretically just as likely to get you in the good books of however many gods you believe in, but significantly different to the "western browsers".

Internet Explorer, on the other hand, is most definitely Scientology...